The types of relationships that hold together a group are many. One of them is the ability of a community to solve or assist with an individual's problems or questions. Another is the ability to find and tackle the ongoing goals of the community. Community is a very scalable term. The idea of community applies from small teams to all manner of organizations of widely varying sizes including clubs, sports, global online gaming, businesses, corporations, government offices and schools. Each grouping has a mission or goal which leads to its own particular types of questions and answers. But no matter how large the organization or corporation, there is almost always a division of labor that leads to a team, a small group within the larger one with its own unique mission and set of questions. This has particular application to classrooms and the professional development of teachers. Questioning, the types of questions preferred and the process used to address them, says much about one's theory or theories of teaching and learning.

Though questioning and the effort to resolve problems is a "common purpose" that lies at the heart of all teams, questioning on its own is insufficient for effective teaming. There are six fundamental components every effective team. "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable." (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993). Each team member should be able see how these apply to the group they are within. Is the common purpose or set of primary questions and problems clear? That is, do you know the complementary skills of your teammates? Is there readily understood agreement on performance goals? Do team members know a wide range of methods and are constantly at work improving them and inventing new ones? Do they hold each other to high standards and can do so in positive personally building ways?

The team's and its larger organization's reason for being almost always has to do with some open ended, unanswered or not yet solved and therefore ongoing problem or problems. There will be a host of supporting trivial and easily answered questions and a range of questions of growing complexity that build to help address the central unanswered questions. When the central question becomes solved or trivial or the team consistently fails to make progress on its questions, generally the team is either disbanded or given an entirely new and different mission. The degree of such skills has many implications in different contexts. The quality of a team's skills could mean the loss of a job or a new and better job. It could mean the closing of a school or merit pay. It could mean the formation of a new business or the bankruptcy of a corporation.

For the process of finding, shaping, sharing and solving problems to be effective, knowledge about the nature of questions, about higher order thinking is essential. A basic place to begin is reviewing the latest revision of Bloom's cognitive taxonomy of higher order thinking skills, for short known as HOTS. More is available at the CROP site.

As we live in the ever so exponential times in the 21st century, the questions, even the most central ones, continue to evolve and come ever faster, with ever greater urgency. Since Johnson and Johnson's seminal work in 1980's, cooperative and collaborative teams have also been an important element of educational thinking for classroom activity. How can we connect teaming with paper and digital systems for questioning? When are partners and other team groupings within a classroom or across classrooms valuable and when not? What has digital technology added that is new to this ancient concept of teaming? How do we prepare teachers to prepare students for such activity and such a world? How can we use the Net, the world's largest idea processor, to support this effort? There is much to learn and to explore.

Teacher Education

One model of teaching is to learn something and then tell it to someone else. When the information has been received, then the teaching is over. The information flow is one way, a kind of transmission line like a TV cable or wireless radio station signal. From this came the idea of the transmission model of teaching. "Mountains of research now demonstrate that this notion of transmission teaching doesn't actually work most of the time" (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p.8). Instead effective teaching requires something else. "Successful teachers link what students already know and understand to new information, correcting misimpressions, guiding learners' understanding through a variety of activities, providing opportunities for application of knowledge, giving useful feeback that shapes performance, and individualizing for students' distinctive learning needs" (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p.8). Another model of the communication line is needed, and a rather effective one is in the pocket of most adults and many children in this day and age, the telephone. Telephone communication is always two-way, and the Web sends information both ways just as easily.

There are many methods for learning what students already know and more importantly for learning what they are motivated to know more about. It could be a test over a range of knowledge, but that seldom captures or reveals a student's motivated interest. A better measure of a learner's knowledge might be a learner's capacity to ask and answer questions about a topic.

Teaching Methods

There are many methods for building and sharing a community or team's questions. In a prior chapter, the idea of the wonder web wall or board was explored and introduced. This works well as long as the users of the board stay in the same space as the board and don't want to include anyone outside of that space. But what if a team must go outside of that narrow geographic space? For example, what if teachers want to have their classes sharing questions and problem solving activities? There are dozens of Web sites with varying Q&A (question and answer designs) that can be found on the problem finding branch of the CROP site.

These ideas will next explore a Q&A web site whose Web address is ecrop.wcu.edu, a software application running on a server at Western Carolina University that was installed at my request expressly for the purposes of this course. The software that runs it is free for the download to anyone with a Net server (a computer connected to and open to access from the Internet running a question and answer database). It is written by programmers who have made a their challenge, their team's goal, to create a product called question2answer. In the chapters ahead, learning how it functions will suggest ideas for professional development and classroom activity.

An Assignment - eCROP.wcu.edu - Question2Answer

Go to ecrop.wcu.edu. Next, register, that is create an account, recording for later use your username and password. Next, add a question. For any question still on the SUP side of the classes Wonder Web Board, its owner should enter that question into the database. All other course participants should come up with a new question and enter it at this site. More questions can be added but the minimum requirement is just one.

Where the questions were originally open to any topic, it is time to narrow the range. Any new questions entered must be defensible as related to the theme or topic of this Digital Literacy Methods course. Your homework assignment is to find someone else's question at this site and respond to it. As different sections come to this reading over the next week the question pool at this time will involve students from one graduate course, one middle grades course, and two elementary courses. You are welcome to respond to anyone's question from any of these course sections.

Technical Procedures to ask a question & respond

Go to ecrop.wcu.edu. Click the tab that says Ask a Question. Follow the directions and enter a single question. On the next screen add any explanatory information that might be needed. If the question is clear there may be no need to add more.

Tags are important, very important. Use the Tags field under the question area to add words that are possible key search terms for the topic of your question. You cannot enter a phrase as tags are only single words (at least as far as I have discovered). For each question you ask, include your section number in the tags field. Use the appropriate section tag: EDEL446-01-spr11, EDEL446-02-spr11, EDMG466-spr11, or ELMG666-spr11.

If you want to search for questions from those in a particular section, we'll need to have section numbers used consistently in the tags field.

Check back periodically to scan the list of Unanswered questions. To see this list and pick one for a contribution, use the Unanswered tab.

References

Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Powerful teacher education: lessons from exemplary programs. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Katzenbach, J. & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams : creating the high-performance organization. Publisher Boston, Mass. : Harvard Business School Press.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., & Holubec, E.J. (1991). Cooperation in The Classroom. Interaction Book Co: Edina, MN.

Page author: Houghton